Footnotes worth reading …

… Raymond Chandler, American Hard-Boiled. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

This “Big Sleep” isn’t just annotated. It’s illustrated with covers of Chandler’s first editions, movie posters from the Marlowe books, the only known photo of Chandler with the man who created and perfected the hard-boiled school of crime fiction, Dashiell Hammett (you will spot them immediately: the only writers in the photo not looking into the camera), and photos of real locations that serve as crime scenes in the book. My favorite is of Malibu Pier—to paraphrase Burt Lancaster in “Atlantic City,” the Pacific Ocean was really something back then.